“Gone” was the first single off Garageland’s final album “Scorpio Righting”. And while they never quite reached the levels of international success they were striving for, they could at least pretend. The “Gone” video is set in an alternate reality where Garageland are big in Asia.
I don’t know exactly which Asian country exactly, but signs seem to point to China. The band are performing on a low-budget looking TV show, crammed into a tiny studio. The TV host introduces them (sounding like she’s reading the lines phonetically), and the camera lingers on the all-Asian crew, who look like a bunch of Chinese New Zealanders.
The band perform “Gone” on the tiny stage, with lead singer Jeremy wearing a pair of bogan sunglasses. Perhaps that’s trendy in faux Asia. We also see the lads signing CD singles for a small but excited group of fans (also all Asian). One fan is so excited she lifts up her top and has Jeremy sign her boob. Another fan presents Andrew the guitarist with a foot massaging stick ensuring a “Lost In Translation” kind of “OMG, Azns r weird!” moment.
The band are interviewed backstage, grapple with Pocky, and discover the song is number one, and not only that, they’ve earned a silver record for their efforts.
It all feels like an elaborate fantasy. If Garageland can’t have number one singles and CD signings to groups of adoring fans in New Zealand, then they can at least experience three minutes and 26 seconds of a Shangri-La where all their pop dreams have come true.
Best bit: the cat, a gift from a really tall fan.
Director: Mitchell Hawkes
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision
Next… the wedding singer.
Deluxe Boy was an earlier incarnation of the band that was to become known as Dukes. “Shadowboxer” was their only NZ On Air funded video. It’s a slick track, reminiscent of mid-’90s Britpop with some turn-of-the-millennium acoustic guitar thrown in, along with slightly disturbing lyrics.
When this video first came out, I saw a making-of item on some youth TV show. This is what I remember: it was filmed at the Mandalay in Auckland, and the big crowd up on the balcony was achieved through digital copy and paste.
At last – an animated music video that doesn’t look like it was abandoned halfway through or done by someone learning the ropes. “Come On” has a Sims style of animation and we meet our hero in his 3D house, getting ready for a night out. This leads him to a nightclub, where he pulls out his fresh Michael Jackson moves, and is promptly ignored by the bustling dancefloor.
This is a rather unusual video. We last saw She’s Insane in 1999. They have a late ’90s alterno pop sound, like a local Veruca Salt. Somehow by 2000 it’s all starting to sound a bit dated, a bit too thin and tweet compared to the fleshier rock sound that was making itself known.
At the heart of the “She’s Jive” video is a cautionary take about drugs. But the Pluto lads dress it up with a kind of Monty Python style humour. A lesson is a lot more palatable when there are lolz involved.
Before he was revealed to be the Ferndale Strangler on “Shortland Street”, Johnny Barker was the lead singer of Jester who had the sweet song “Fries with That”.
The “Saboteur” vid is a Tarantino-inspired outing, set in central Wellington. The action starts at the Marksman Motor Inn (just across the road from the Basin Reserve), with DJ Raw collecting King Kapisi for a gig. They cruise around Wellington in a vintage car where Kapisi takes a call on a chunky old Ericsson cellphone (but not old enough to be vintage). On the other end is Dave Fane, playing the “Samoan bar manager”, who rants at the “Samoan emcee” and “Samoan turntablist” (everyone in this video gets labelled). The duo arrive at Bar Bodega in its old location, before it was shuffled along Willis Street to make way for the bypass.
Of the four videos Joe Lonie made with Goodshirt, I’d consider “Blowing Dirt” to be the strongest. There’s a simple concept behind it, it looks good and it fits with the song. Being a Lonie video, it’s not surprisingly based around a gimmick. In this case, the video was filmed in reverse and in one take. So there’s Rodney doing a reverse lip-sync with the rest of the band un-smashing up an old car.